Tech Startup Dor Scores $3.8M Seed Round | PYMNTS.com

Retailers are seeking solutions to digitize their physical stores—both as a means to draw consumers in, but also to leverage the data that comes with digital transformation.

For their part, technology startup Dor is a foot traffic counting and analytics solution vendor. Just recently, Dor announced a $3.8 million seed investment round led by Zetta Venture Partners with participation from Vertex Ventures.

The startup, based in San Francisco, was founded by an ex-Apple employee. It offers retailers a scaleable foot traffic sensor and analytics platform which leverages thermal sensing and machine learning algorithms to track customer traffic and provide insights to retailers.

While the majority of commerce transactions still take place in physical stores, online retail is growing its market share. The insight this type of solution can provide to brick-and-mortar retail could help them to compete with online demand by optimizing in-store procedures.

“Monitoring traffic at such low cost – with no installation or maintenance – allows retailers to understand their customers at a level never imagined,” said Ash Fontana, Managing Director at Zetta Venture Partners. “This ease of use also opens up new markets, allowing customers to use Dor to optimize commercial building maintenance, measure space utilization and for security.”

Dor’s solution and the insight it provides looks to enable retailers to optimize staffing, improve marketing and increase conversion by helping retailers better understand what affects traffic to their stores.

The company’s battery-powered sensor sticks to retailers’ doors and, rather than require Wi-Fi connectivity, instead operates on a closed cellular network—sending real-time, actionable analytics to a cloud-based dashboard able to be accessed on any device.

The startup’s platform integrates with PoS systems like Square and Lightspeed to provide insights into revenue’s correlation with store traffic. It also incorporates real-time weather data into the analysis to boot.

Dor already has implementations with national chains operating thousands of retail locations, including one of the nation’s largest wireless service providers, the company said.